Purpose: This guide is for people for whom direct rendering does not work with just XOrg. X11-DRM works for 3dfx, gamma, i8x0, matrox, rage128, radeon, sis (sis 650 does NOT work), mach64, savage, and via unichrome. Don't read any further if you can't use any of those. See the DRI homepage for more info and documentation.

X11-DRM will NOT work with anything higher than a Radeon 9200, as ATI hasn't released specs and no one has sponsored development for the r300 chipset, which the Radeon 9500 and up use.

What is X11-DRM and how does it relate to regular X11? Due to a little confusion about what XFree-DRM really is and how it's different from XFree: XFree-DRM is an enhancement to XFree that adds 3D acceleration for cards that XFree doesn't give acceleration.

I have now turned this into a troubleshooting/updates post, since the real guide is in the official Gentoo Docs.

Troubleshooting

Install with VIDEO_CARDS="yourcard" emerge x11-drm.

It used to work, but stopped? If you switched kernels or recompiled your kernel, you need to remerge x11-drm.

If you have a PCI card, you may also need Option "ForcePCIMode" "True" in Section "Device."

For those of you using 2.5 or 2.6 kernels, x11-drm isn't working yet, but the XOrg 6.8 and older DRM is included in the kernel.

If /dev/dri isn't rwxrwxrwx, change it with chmod.
If /dev/dri/card0 isn't rw-rw-rw-, you forgot Section "DRI" in xorg.conf.
If you can't load agpgart, make sure your AGP chipset is in your kernel. If it isn't available, try loading with 'modprobe agpgart agp_try_unsupported=1'.

thanks for this useful guide. It worked immediatly, but I have absolutly no speed increase. Glxgears gives me around 380fps wich is a few frames less than I had with the 2.4.20 kernel driver and xfree 4.2.1. I have a IBM Thinkpad X24 here: P3 1.1Ghz, Radeon Mobility M6 with only 8MB Video RAM. Strange. Now I switched back to stable.

thanks for this useful guide. It worked immediatly, but I have absolutly no speed increase. Glxgears gives me around 380fps wich is a few frames less than I had with the 2.4.20 kernel driver and xfree 4.2.1. I have a IBM Thinkpad X24 here: P3 1.1Ghz, Radeon Mobility M6 with only 8MB Video RAM. Strange. Now I switched back to stable.

Martin

Direct rendering was off beforehand and on after, yet you saw no increase in FPS? That's odd. However, I have heard that 8MB of memory isn't enough to support DRI in some cases.

Direct rendering was off beforehand and on after, yet you saw no increase in FPS? That's odd. However, I have heard that 8MB of memory isn't enough to support DRI in some cases.

No, it is on in both cases, at least glxinfo says so. What makes you think that only xfree 4.3.0 supports DRI? It is an available option in good old kernel 2.4.20.

When I switch to 24bit color depth, I lose 200fps because DRI is not available in that mode. So glxgears definitively profits from DRI, regardless if kernel or latest xfree drivers are used.

I still wonder why I only get 388fps max with DRI enabled. Is it conceivable that glxgears is slowed down by the small amount of 8MB video ram? I know from a benchmark under windows (3DMark2001SE: 1658), that the thinkpad X24 performs quite well compared to shared memory solutions (i830/Thinkpad X30: 667).

When I installed xfree 4.3.0 there was one detail in glxinfo, that mades me wondering: The OpenGL vendor string was not "Precision Insight" as stated in the DRI user manual. I don't remember exactly the name, it started with T like Tucson, Tranton or so.

I have an i810 graphics chip and is running stock Xfree 4.3.0 and have DRI working just fine. glxgears give me about 700-800 fps.
Erik

My embeded graphic has 8mb shared ram allocated and I use 16 bits color. I understand that 845G graphic use i810 driver. But I could not get X to run properly in gentoo. On redhat9 DRI is not going with i810 loaded either. However, it clock 330+ on glxgears without DRI.

Question is what is your video ram size? Can you share your config? and procedure to get it going? or 8mb video ram has no chance? Thanks.

Can someone please explain the difference between the latest Xfree 4.3 build and Xfree DRM. On xfree's site, there is no explanation. I looked at the Xfree-DRM ebuild, and it does not seem to be doing much more than the Xfree ebuild. (Of course, I am a n00b with ebuilds...)

I am confused since the Xfree team says they already support 3dfx (I have a Voodoo3 2000)._________________-----------------------------------------
Michael

when I was using xfree-4.2, installing xfree didn't install the dri kernel modules for me. the dri modules in the kernel source are for xfree86 4.1 so they don't work. I used to 'emerge -u xfree' then after it was done I would use 'ebuild fetch unpack' to get the xfree86 source tree in /var/tmp/portage, then I would have to go in there to the correct directory, compile the kernel module r128.o, and copy it to the /lib/modules directory, then modprobe it to get dri to work.

anything anyone sees there that will be a clue as to why dri wont come on? im still getting only like 300 FPS...did the driver not get installed properly from xfree-drm or something? because when i did insmod radeon it said "no module by that name found"...

remove all your previous modules
cd /usr/src/linux && make menuconfig
enable into kernel /dev/apgart and remove Xfree-dri && drm from the kernel
then emerge xfree-drm, removed 2 modules that gave me odd warnings when running modules-update
reboot with kernel and f*ck around with you XF86Config a little( that did it for me )
kdm/gdm/whatever and type glxinfo

personally said screw it, installed the 2.5.67 dev kernel with DRM built in, and it got me up to around 400 FPS in glxgears. not spectacular, but twice as good as before...now if only i knew whether or not 3d support was working...is it something else i have to configure?